About “Harlem Shadows”

In three stanzas, employing end rhyme, McKay writes sympathetically of the experience of black sex workers in a “degrading urban environment.” A seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance, McKay was born in Jamaica, and migrated to the US to study at the Tuskegee Institute in 1912. He describes the women in the dark walking the streets in disgrace and how this represent the race.